All Articles Tagged "michelle obama"

They’re bold visionaries who are an inspiration to not just black women, but all women. And just like many of the women who have come before them, they will go down in history for their contributions and accomplishments. But instead of waiting to celebrate them long after they’re gone, it’s only fitting to recognize their accomplishments now.

Some are more familiar than others; but each of them are playing a major role in changing the world and the representation of black women, and we appreciate them for that.

So as we prepare to close Black History Month, let’s celebrate our sisters who are paving the way for us all.

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For the first time ever, Cooking Light has decided to feature a person on the cover of their publication, but of course, they didn’t select just any person. On the cover of their history-making issue appears none other than the lovely Michelle Obama. The special March 2015 issue also commemorates the 5th anniversary of the FLOTUS’ popular Let’s Move campaign.

Inside, the mom of two discusses the importance of dining together as a family on a nightly basis and also, how making simple changes in her daughters’ diets drastically improved their health. We should also mention that she was a busy working mom at the time when these changes were made. According to Lady O, it all began during a trip to the doctor’s office after she was informed by the girls’ pediatrician that something was “a little off.”

“So we made very simple changes as a result of what our pediatrician told us,” Michelle recalled. “I cooked probably one or two more meals, and it was something simple—maybe a baked chicken, couscous, steamed broccoli. I kept it simple but made sure there was always a vegetable and always a good grain on the plate.”

She also decided to slash processed foods from Sasha and Malia’s diets and while she didn’t deprive them of juice, she did water down sugary beverages in hopes of gradually weaning them off.

“More importantly, we just eliminated all the processed foods, all those packaged lunches, all of the canned juices. We started using fresh-squeezed juice and added more water into their diet. So when the kids were thirsty, we would even mix water in juice just to dilute it so it would get them out of that habit of wanting that sugary taste. And the kids adapted to the changes very quickly.”

Her efforts certainly were not in vain, by the time the girls were due back for a doctor’s visit, he noticed a drastic difference.

“By the time we went back for the next visit, our pediatrician said, ‘What have you done?’ And I was like, ‘What?’ He said, ‘I haven’t seen these numbers change in such a short period of time in this way in a while.’ And that’s when we started having the conversation of just how easy—it’s about information and knowledge. I didn’t know, but once I had the information, it was fairly easy to make the changes.”

She also shared a cute story about how Obama-family-personal-chef-turned-White-House-Food-Initiative-Coordinator assisted in the elimination of processed food from the Obama family diet.

“My kids loved the macaroni and cheese in a box. And he said, if it’s not real food then we’re not going to do it. If we want macaroni and cheese, we’ll cook it with real milk and real cheese. He said, there’s nothing wrong with mac and cheese, but it’s got to be real food.

So my oldest daughter [Malia], who was probably 8 at the time, he took a block of cheese and he said, if you can cut this cheese up into the powder that is the cheese of the boxed macaroni and cheese, then we’ll use it. She sat there for 30 minutes trying to pulverize a block of cheese into dust. I mean, she was really focused on it, and it just didn’t work, so she had to give up. And from then on, we stopped eating macaroni and cheese out of a box, because cheese dust is not food, as was the moral of that story.”

As for the importance of family dining together each night, Michelle says she learned this particular lesson from her own parents.

“My dad was a shift worker, so there were some dinner times when he was at work, but whenever he was there we would sit around the table with the plastic tablecloth, and that’s when we would catch up and we’d talk about what we were eating, talk about what was going on in the day.

And it’s that tradition that Barack and I really try to incorporate in our lives, even though we’re extremely busy in the White House. We’ve found that we’ve been able to have dinner every—almost every night together, between 6:30 and 7:00. We have a bigger table and somebody else is doing the cooking, but the conversation and the mood and the tone are still the same. It’s our most important time of the day.”

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Photos of Michelle Obama’s Wednesday meeting with the Saudi Arabian king hit the web — and the Internet has been abuzz with controversy about one thing: Why wasn’t the FLOTUS wearing a hijab (a head covering)? Answer: Because it’s not mandatory!

Sure, Saudi Arabian law requires women to keep their hair covered and wear full length, long-sleeved garments, but this does not apply to female visitors, according to ThinkProgress. In fact, Western female politicians have been strutting around the Arab world without a head covering for years.

According to Jezebel, Laura Bush met the late King Abdullah bare-headed in 2007. And Hilary Clinton, as Secretary of State, met Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal and Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheikh Sabah Khaled al-Hamad Al-Sabah back in 2012, also sans the hijab.

Despite this, the Twittersphere went bonkers and there was a hashtag #Michelle_Obama_Immodest (though a few hashtags note that it was infrequently used). Various news outlets, jumping aboard the social media craze, reported that Obama was making a “bold political statement,” as The Washington Postputs it, against the Saudi Arabian legal system, which impinges on women’s rights. Bloomberg Businessweek noted that the FLOTUS “quietly but forcefully represented women in a land that refuses to grant them so many rights.”

Even Ted Cruz applauded Obama’s statement: “Kudos to @FLOTUS for standing up for women & refusing to wear Sharia-mandated head-scarf in Saudi Arabia. Nicely done,” he tweeted, according to The Guardian.

Not so sure if the FLOTUS was issuing some kind of message, but according Ottawa-based analyst Nidal Diaz, if Obama did wear a veil, the backlash would have been worse:

“The unfortunate truth is that this had little to do with her making a stand for a woman’s right to not wear a veil and/or the Saudi government’s institutionalized sexism but more to do with attempting to avoid further perpetuating the American Right’s obsession for stigmatizing Obama and family as Muslims, and, approaching an election year, to prevent the Democrat administration from appearing to submit to the way of life of the vilified Saudis/Wahhabis,” Diaz said, according to Vox.

At the very least, we do know that the FLOTUS did, in fact, follow protocol. But at the very most, the FLOTUS is a fashion icon with, as WaPo puts it, “an unparalleled global audience” thanks to social media.

Look how she had us talking about women’s rights — with just the absence of a headdress. Wow.

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While admittedly the President gets center stage at the 2015 State of the Union, we’re eager, as always, to see what the first lady is wearing.

On Tuesday night, Michelle Obama stepped out in a Michael Kors skirt suit. The tweed design, which boasted a wide collar and zipper detailing, is a perfect reflection of FLOTUS’ love for form-fitting, yet sophisticated frocks. You might also recognize the suit if you’re a fan of “The Good Wife.” And we’ve seen the first lady in Michael Kors several times before, including the first-ever White House Turnaround Arts Talent Show, the night President Obama was reelected and in her official White House portrait in 2013, just to name a few.

In the latest issue of People magazine, Barack and Michelle Obama open up about their personal experiences with racism. According to Michelle, many people are under the impression that the two have somehow been shielded from dealing with prejudice in their everyday life—something that the first lady says is definitely not true. Check out a few highlights from their interview below

On people thinking they haven’t experienced racism,

Michelle: “I think people forget that we’ve lived in the White House for six years. Before that, Barack Obama was a black man that lived on the South Side of Chicago, who had his share of troubles catching cabs.”

On their experiences with racism,

Michelle: “I tell this story – I mean, even as the first lady – during that wonderfully publicized trip I took to Target, not highly disguised, the only person who came up to me in the store was a woman who asked me to help her take something off a shelf. Because she didn’t see me as the first lady, she saw me as someone who could help her. Those kinds of things happen in life. So it isn’t anything new.”

Barack: “There’s no black male my age, who’s a professional, who hasn’t come out of a restaurant and is waiting for their car and somebody didn’t hand them their car keys.”

Michelle: “[One time] he was wearing a tuxedo at a black-tie dinner, and somebody asked him to get coffee.”

On why we shouldn’t compare current racism to what was experienced during the civil rights era,

Barack: “The small irritations or indignities that we experience are nothing compared to what a previous generation experienced. It’s one thing for me to be mistaken for a waiter at a gala. It’s another thing for my son to be mistaken for a robber and to be handcuffed, or worse, if he happens to be walking down the street and is dressed the way teenagers dress.”

For the first couple’s full interview, pick up the latest issue of People.

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Tika Sumpter has landed the role of Michelle Obama in the romance film “Southside With You.” The film will focus on the early romance stages of The Obamas. According to Indiewire,

The project is being pitched as a “Before Sunset”-style type of movie (in short, man, woman, lots of mostly profound conversation over a period of time), which will take place entirely in one day during the summer of 1989, when one Barack Obama (then a first-year Harvard Law student) took his future wife, Michelle (an associate at a Chicago law firm), out on a first date, which included a tour of Chicago’s South Side.

The film will be directed by Richard Tanne and produced by Stephanie Allain. Reportedly Richard Tanne and Tika Sumpter worked on the script together. Sumpter will serve as an executive producer on the project.

Young Obama has not been cast just yet. Therefore this gives us time to voice our opinion! Who would you like to see on screen as our president?

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On the last episode of Do The Wright Thing, we focused on maintaining healthy hair when coloring. In this episode, we’re officially saying goodbye to dry and brittle hair. With the Optimum Amla Legend Rejuvenating Oil, it will leave your hair moisturized, soft and healthy.

For more information on the Optimum Salon Haircare products, visit their website.

If you’re on a Democratic mailing list, chances are you’ve received some pretty frantic emails the past few days. Tuesday night was a fundraising deadline and the party wanted to make sure to get every cent it could. That includes Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, Rep. John Lewis of Georgia and President Obama himself. Or at least their party reps.

Make no mistake; Republicans are doing it too. But Dems are in danger of losing much-needed seats come the midterm elections. So there’s some urgency there. Most importantly, fundraisers in the party say the deluge of emails work. Researchers The Washington Postspoke with say that telling people a negative event will happen if they don’t act is more likely to spur people to action that telling people about a positive outcome of their actions. And emails that “come from” President Obama will get the biggest response.

And by big response, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars. Analysis from the National Journal finds that Democrats are out-raising Republicans, on average, by more than $100,000 in small donations in political races around the country. The average Democrat raises $179,300 in donations of less than $200. The average Republican, just $78,535. In total, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has raised $41 million more than the National Republican Congressional Committee during this election cycle. Some experts on the Republican side say it’s harder to raise money for new candidates, others say it’s a failure on the digital side of things.

The Democrats also have a powerful weapon on their side: women. The aforementioned Rep. Pelosi, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman, and the woman herself, First Lady Michelle Obama are among the people in high demand for fundraising events. In fact, FLOTUS and the Clintons are the people that one Democratic committee member said would be his dream fundraising event.

“With her 61 percent approval rating and a talent for connecting with women and minority audiences in particular, she is uniquely able to go into states where even the president and vice president struggle to motivate voters and donors,” The Daily Beast said of Michelle Obama.

On the Republican side, women are generally not faring as well, in part experts say because there’s no high-profile woman to generate excitement. Republicans need women leaders that will get people to pull out their wallets if they’re going to try and match this Democratic female firepower.